Daily Mail, November 15 2002

Pinch me; I must be dreaming. The police are going to come down on us like a ton of bricks if we drop chewing gum in the street, while turning a blind eye to people having homosexual intercourse in the middle of a local park.

What kind of madness is this? According to the Queen's Speech, it is what the Government calls 'tackling anti-social behaviour'. This was surely one of the most surreal Queen's Speeches in memory - and one of the most sinister and terrifying.

It is not just that the Government's new programme is astonishingly illiberal. It's not just that it threatens to tear up hundreds of years of tradition in the name of some callow concept of modernisation. It's the fact that it takes our most cherished values - justice, self-restraint, order and liberty - and simply turns them inside out.

All this while managing to avoid tackling the real issues which so trouble and preoccupy this nation - the collapse of the public services; the sheer, bungling incompetence of virtually every arm of government; the implosion of education standards; and the real causes of crime: mass fatherlessness, drug-taking and the erosion of community responsibility and pride.

Yet what is the reaction to a set of proposals that reads like something straight out of Lewis Carroll? Virtual silence. One or two commentators have bewailed the illiberalism of the criminal justice proposals. But the full, far-reaching import of this bizarre programme has occasioned no general outburst of astonishment or protest. It's as if the nation has been anaesthetised.

True, the lawyers will fight some of the criminal justice proposals. But those in a position of influence -- the university vice-chancellors, the doctors, the police, the higher reaches of the judiciary - who should be raising merry hell about the real problems we face and shouting from the rooftops about the war being waged against common-sense, decency and truth, have been all but emasculated.

They are exhausted and demoralised. They know standards have been eroded. They know our precious liberties are in danger. But they don't speak up because of the vice-like grip in which they are now held by a government that has taken control over everyday provision to an unprecedented degree.

But if ever a fighting spirit is needed, it is surely now. For the Government's programme should alarm anyone concerned to protect and uphold both freedom and order.

Take its centrepiece measures on criminal justice, said to 're-balance' the system in favour of victims. In three key areas, it will take an axe to some of our most fundamental freedoms, astonishingly described by Home Secretary David Blunkett as 'twisted traditions'.

The first is the end of the double jeopardy rule which prevents someone being tried twice for the same offence. This move was recommended by the Macpherson report into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, where the prime suspects could not be retried having already been acquitted in

private prosecution.

But even if further evidence arrives after a trial has finished, trying someone again is simply oppressive. A criminal trial should be the end of the matter; otherwise, there is no limit to police 'fishing expeditions'.

The second onslaught is the proposal to allow a jury to be told in certain circumstances of a defendant's previous convictions. This undermines the cardinal principle that guilt has to be proved.

Mr Blunkett says it is untenable to hold that someone who has already committed ten rapes is as likely to be innocent of a further rape charge as someone who has never committed such a crime.

For a Home Secretary to show such a cavalier attitude to the presumption of innocence is simply astounding. On his logic, one might as well do without a trial altogether and judge a man guilty simply because of his past.

The third attack on our liberties is restricting jury trial in serious fraud or other complex cases. But the principle behind jury trial is that if someone faces imprisonment, he should be tried by his peers as a safeguard against an oppressive state.

What's behind all these proposals is the assumption that all defendants are guilty, and so the system which lets some of them off must be 'twisted'. But it's not the system but the Government's assumption that's twisted here.

Not only is this assault on our ancient principles a recipe for injustice - it will fail to address the problem of crime itself. People are above all victims of crime, not of the criminal justice system. What happens in court is pretty marginal to the victims of crime, since so few criminals are prosecuted.

The real scandal is that so many crimes are committed in the first place, and that so few of them are dealt with at all. And that boils down to the failure to deal with the roots of crime and to police it properly.

Yet the incidence of crime is actually likely to be increased, not reduced, by other parts of the Government's programme. Its proposals to crack down on anti-social behaviour such as dropping litter or chewing gum, or graffiti and fly posting, are not wrong in themselves.

American 'zero tolerance' policies which include such measures have had remarkable success. The thinking behind this is that all the signals on anti-social behaviour have to point in the same direction. In other words, you must have 'zero tolerance' of ALL criminal and anti-social behaviours.

But our government is pointing some crucial signals in precisely the wrong direction - such as introducing round-the-clock drinking.

What is the point of signalling to young people -- whose drinking has already reached an alarming scale -- that it's perfectly OK for them to stagger out of a pub at four in the morning, but then the full force of the law will descend upon them if they drop a crisp packet?

What on earth is the point of cracking down hard on graffiti when Mr Blunkett is simultaneously liberalising the law on drug-taking and our streets are awash with every kind of drug?

And what is the point of fiddling around with chewing gum, when the Government is continuing to undermine the family and presiding over widespread educational failure, two major causes of crime?

Ministers simply refuse to tackle the collapse of parental responsibility and authority that fuels so much juvenile criminality. Its parenting orders are the equivalent of applying sticking plaster to an amputated limb. For the core problem that is sending children out of control is the absence of fathers, not just from individual families but in some areas from entire communities.

Yet the government insists on promulgating the message that every type of household, however fractured, is equally valid in the upbringing of children. It is busy giving equal rights to cohabitants despite the fact that cohabitation is now the major force behind the growing scourge of fatherlessness. It is thus giving a green light to adult irresponsibility.

Imposing on-the-spot fines on parents of children who play truant is all very well. But once again, it’s a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Very often, a child who is truanting comes from a background of emotional and practical chaos because of the absence of its father.

Instead of facing up to this deep-seated and most urgent of problems, the Government is choosing to open up yet another front in the war against men that has done so much damage to family life. It is proposing to change the law on sex offences in a way that will both criminalise innocent men and offend the sensibilities of ordinary people.

A woman who claims she has been raped will be presumed not to have given her consent to sex if she was drunk. Not only will the burden of proof shift to the male defendant – destroying another precious principle - but it means, absurdly, that any woman who is drunk and has sex must technically have been raped. And all because the Government believes - preposterously -- that men accused of rape must be guilty, and their acquittal denies 'victims’ their rights.

But then, 'victim culture' - or the trampling of majority interests by minority demands -- lies at the heart of the Government's thinking. Offences of gross indecency and soliciting by homosexuals are to be repealed, and gay sex in public will become legal - unless someone complains, when it will become an offence.

But this means that a mother and her small children, say, may have to stumble across this scene in a local park and then make a complaint. By what grotesque set of values can such a deeply uncivilised scenario possibly be justified?

The onslaught on our freedoms and values does not stop there. The new extradition warrant will mean that a European country such as, say, Spain can have a British citizen arrested in Britain for making a xenophobic remark in Spain. He will then be removed from his own country and, with no evidence ever having been presented, flung into a Spanish jail to await

trial for an activity which the British don't even recognise as a crime.

How can such a sinister and yet deeply irrelevant programme have ever been created? Mr Blair is said to be galvanised by a new sense of urgency. No wonder. He looks around and finds everything is in worse shape than when he started. So he turns against the institutions and values of the country.

No-one dares tell him that the problem lies in his own policies. No-one dares tell him that, crucially, his government's mania for control over the public services destroys the sense of local belonging and involvement that is one of the best antidotes to crime.

No-one can tell him any of this because he is surrounded by so many sycophants and shallow, post-modern wreckers who are only too eager to destroy British tradition.

The real problem is that those who should be standing up against this tyranny lack the one crucial thing that might give them courage. They cannot see any end to this government's grip on power. With the Conservative Party indulging itself in its protracted nervous breakdown, there is no real opposition. The next election has already been written off as a shoo-in for Tony Blair.

Whether or not this is necessarily true is beside the point. People assume it to be so. So they lack the motivation or courage to stand up and fight. The result is that hundreds of thousands of ordinary, decent people who look on in bemusement feel utterly disenfranchised, as there is no-one to

fight the battles that need to be fought.

But don't worry: criminalising hunting with dogs is once again back on the agenda. We can all rest easy in our beds.

Posted by admin at November 15, 2002